Ben Affleck is the story of this year's Oscar race

“Argo,” the movie inspired by the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, is going to win the Academy Award as best picture of 2012. Go ahead, place that bet in your office Oscar pool, but don’t expect to reap much advantage, because everybody else is just as sure that “Argo” is going to win.

The signs are impossible to miss or to deny. Like “The King’s Speech” a couple years back and like “The Artist” the year after that, “Argo” has been sweeping the film industry’s pre-Oscar contests: the Producers Guild Award, the ensemble award from the Screen Actors Guild, “outstanding directorial achievement” from the Directors Guild (DGA) and the BAFTAs (the trophies from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for best picture and direction. Since many of the voters in those various contests are also members of the Hollywood academy, they’ve already vouchsafed a de facto peek at a lot of Oscar ballots.

Best picture

There is, to be sure, a notable break with the usual pattern. In most years, the director of the movie about to be named best picture would be called to the podium to collect the Oscar for best direction. And much more often than not, that Oscar victory has been predicted by a DGA win. So we’re on track, right? Ben Affleck, star and director of “Argo,” won the DGA. Yes, but whereas the nominees for the DGA and those for the best-director Oscar tend to be the same or pretty much the same, this year, only two of the DGA nominees made it onto the Oscar slate. And neither of those two was Ben Affleck.

How and why this happened boggles the mind; we’ll probably never know. What we can say is that, far from blighting “Argo”’s chances for winning best pic, the snubbing of its director seems to have inspired a backlash. “Argo” lovers are all the more determined to honor their movie, and mere “Argo” likers who might have been inclined to vote for one of the other eight best-picture nominees have swung to “Argo.”

Also, as past best-director winners Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Richard Attenborough, Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson can tell you, the biggest voting bloc in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is the actors’ branch, and they like to see one of their own make good.

For the record, those other eight nominees for best picture are “Amour,” a rare instance of a foreign-language film breaking into this category; “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the fave rave among American independent films in 2012; “Django Unchained,” Quentin Tarantino’s expectedly outrageous foray into spaghetti-western territory; “Les Misérables,” from the decades-long-running musical; “Life of Pi,” Ang Lee’s version of the “unfilmable” mystical novel; Steven Spielberg’s historical drama “Lincoln”; “Silver Linings Playbook,” the best romantic comedy in living memory; and “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s distillation of the 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Best director

As for the director scorecard, only Ang Lee and Spielberg carry over from the DGA slate. MIA along with Affleck are fellow DGA nominees Bigelow (winner three years ago for “The Hurt Locker”) and Tom “Les Miz” Hooper (winner two years ago for “The King’s Speech”); their slots on the Oscar ballot are occupied by Michael Haneke (“Amour”), David O. Russell (“Silver Linings Playbook”) and Benh Zeitlin (first-time director of “Beasts of the Southern Wild”).

We’ve spoken of “Argo”’s conquest of industry awards (and by all means the goofy Golden Globes), but it should be noted that Affleck’s crowd-pleasing movie barely showed up in critics-group award reckonings. In such contests, Bigelow/”Zero Dark Thirty” and Haneke/”Amour” mostly traded first-place honors, with “Lincoln” (though curiously not Spielberg) crowding for second place.

The discrepancy is easy enough to account for. Bigelow’s, Haneke’s and even Spielberg’s films are complex works of art that challenge audiences and then leave it up to those audiences to deal with the implications of what they’ve witnessed and experienced.

“Argo” is a well-made movie with a fascinating (and mostly true) story to tell, of how six U.S. Foreign Service workers were “exfiltrated” from Tehran during the 1979 Iranian hostage-taking crisis, and when it’s over, it’s over. No resonance, no takeaway. A good movie, yes indeed, and there can never be an oversupply of those. But “best film” — truly?

So, since it can’t be Affleck (and the Academy no longer allows write-in votes), who takes best director? This category is anybody’s guess.

Spielberg has won twice already, and although “Lincoln” is much respected, I don’t get the sense people are excited about it.

“Life of Pi” must be accounted an awesome technical achievement (the costar and most of the action is all CGI!), but should it win Lee a second Oscar?

Haneke doesn’t make a wrong move with “Amour,” and denied the chance to vote for Bigelow, I guess I’d go with him.

David O. Russell isn’t my kind of director visually, but “Silver Linings Playbook” is the first movie in 31 years to score nominations in all four acting categories, and he’s gotta rate for that.

Zeitlin doesn’t belong here.

Best acting honors

“Silver Linings Playbook”’s Jennifer Lawrence (“Hey!”) is the favorite for best actress, and certainly mine, but it will be deeply moving if the luminous Emmanuelle Riva, of “Amour,” celebrates her 86th birthday with an Oscar win; hers is one of the bravest performances ever seen.

Inappropriate: Naomi Watts, in “The Impossible” (but not enough of it), Quvenzhané Wallis, best thing about “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (but a kid).

Best actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln” — take it to the bank.

Best supporting actress: I don’t see how anything stops Anne Hathaway, of “Les Misérables,” though I wish it would. Sally Field deserves the Oscar for her Mary Todd in “Lincoln,” and Helen Hunt deserves another for “The Sessions.”

Best supporting actor: His work as the father in “Silver Linings Playbook” is the first performance Robert De Niro has woken up to give in years. He could even win, but keep an eye on Tommy Lee Jones in his rather-too-showcase part in “Lincoln” and Philip Seymour Hoffman as “The Master” and Christoph Waltz in “Django Unchained” are world-beaters, but they seem out of place in the supporting category.

Further remarks plus notes from the battlefield next week. The Oscars will be awarded this coming Sunday, Feb. 24, at 5:30 p.m. on KOMO-4.

RICHARD T. JAMESON, a former editor of the Queen Anne/Magnolia News, is a member of the National Society of Film Critics. To comment on this story, write to QAMagNews@nwlink.com.

The truth of this year is that Ben Affleck is the story of the Awards season and deservedly so. It is also a truth that the Academy made a huge blunder, and now, whoever wins Best Director will be second place. No way around it. They will have the Oscar and nothing else because Ben Affleck has swept them all. Good for him, he produced the best film of the season and accepted the snub by the Academy with grace and humility. He may be and probably is horribly disappointed and even ticked off but has kept it completely hidden. Well done, Mr. Affleck!!This comment has been hidden due to low approval.

Such lackluster choices are very unbecoming of such a tremendous year for cinema. Where are the nominations for movies like "The Grey," "Jesus Henry Christ" and "Killing them Softly"? Read about the Top 10 Movies of 2012 with reviews and other honorable mentions at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2013/01/top-10-movie-picks-of-2012.htmlThis comment has been hidden due to low approval.